ABSTRACT
The path of a bulb from a eld in The Netherlands to a market in North America is a long and complicated one. In most cases, bulbs are grown in elds (there are more than 25,000 hectares of bulbs produced in Holland annually) and harvested at or during leaf senescence, after current photosynthesis has “relled” the bulb. Depending on the species, the basic procedure is that bulbs are cleaned, “peeled” (the process or removing side bulbs, often used for planting stock), sized (generally by circumference), counted, and placed into sales packages (for the retail or commercial landscape market) or into “export crates” for transport to professional forcing markets around the world.
